The Invasion Year (29 page)

“Lewrie, did he say…?” Blanding asked, looking aghast.

“ ’Deed he
did,
sir,” Lewrie replied, shaking his head. “It must have stuck in his head from yours, and he did it by rote. I’m sure it was a mistake, soon t’be corrected.”

Blanding’s wife was looking huffy, as if Lewrie had both insulted the Sovereign and diminished the grandeur of her husband’s investiture. Chaplain Brundish and the new-minted Reverend Blanding frowned as if someone—like Lewrie—had run stark naked through church, whilst Miss Blanding was making cow-eyes, as if actually impressed.

“Pity it won’t stick,” Sir Hugo drawled, looking wryly amused.

“Where’d ye find the wine?” Lewrie asked him. “And do they have brandy?”

Now the King was conferring honours on the Cambridge don, this time reading
much
more closely and sticking to the script. A polite round of applause followed. The Foreign Office chap got his knighthood—and no more!—and all applauded again, the tepid sort of acknowledgement preferred in Society; too much enthusiasm was deemed crude and “common.” Once the last claps died, the string music began again, and people began to mingle, filling up the lane between. Trays of wine began to circulate, and Lewrie excused himself from the Blandings to beat up to a liveried servant with flutes of champagne, threading his way between people in his haste, nodding and smiling whenever one of them addressed him as “Sir Alan” in congratulations. He
almost
snagged a glass, but for the interruption of the senior courtier who’d first steered him to the side-chamber.

“A word, if I may, Sir Alan? May I be the first to address you as such?” he asked.

“About the, ah…?” Lewrie asked with a knowing smile.

“Exactly so, sir. If you would be so kind as to come this way?”

He was led to the same side-chamber, where Sir Harper Strachan, Baron Ludlow, stood grimacing and working his mouth from side to side in agitation, as if he wore badly-fitted dentures.

“Hah! There you are, sir!” Strachan snapped, stamping his cane on the floor like a school proctor about to thrash an unready student, as if the gaffe was Lewrie’s fault, and doing.

“Aye, here I am, milord,” Lewrie coolly answered, wondering if he actually was in some sort of trouble.

“We feared you would get away before being presented with your patent, and your decorations, Sir Alan,” the senior courtier said with an Oxonian drawl much like Strachan’s, but much more pleasantly, as if trying to defuse the situation … or defuse Strachan. “If you’d be so good as to remove your coat for a moment, Sir Alan?”

Lewrie had not noticed before that a long side-board bore several shallow rectangular boxes, one of which the courtier opened. “Your sash, Sir Alan,” he said, producing a wide bright blue strip of satin which he looped over Lewrie’s chest from right shoulder to left hip.

Christ, this is for real!
Lewrie realised as he put his coat back on, and the courtier brought out the silver-and-
cloisonné
star, which he pinned to the left breast of Lewrie’s uniform coat.

“Most wear the sash under the coat, sir,” the courtier informed him, “though there are some who wish their coats to be doubled over and buttoned, then wear the sash outside the coat, beneath the right epaulet.”

“Risky for gravy stains,” was the first thing to pop into Alan Lewrie’s head.

“Oh, indeed, Sir Alan!” the courtier agreed, simpering happily.

“Grr,” or what sounded like it, from Strachan.

“The documents will have to follow along, later, Sir Alan,” the courtier went on. “They must be amended, do you see as will the preliminary work of the College of Heralds, to reflect your baronetcy.”

“Amended? Mean t’say the King’s slip’ll…?” Lewrie gaped.

“Sir Alan,” Strachan interjected, high-nosed and arch, though
striving
for pleasance. “His Majesty, the Crown, does not
make
slips, as you term them. His Majesty does not
err
.” That word sounded more like “Grrr” without the G. “And,
should
our Sovereign, ehm … get ahead of himself, then it
is
no error.”

“Mine arse on a band-box!” Lewrie blurted, stunned. “Mean t’say I really did … the
King
really did make me a baronet, too?”

“That is the case, Sir Alan,” the courtier said, beaming.

“He did,” Strachan intoned, sounding imperious
and
angered.

“One must
assume,
Sir Alan, that His Majesty, on the spur of the moment, deemed your actions in the battle … the only noteworthy that occurred last year entire …
so
praiseworthy that he decided to name you Knight
and
Baronet in sign of royal gratitude,” the courtier conjectured with a hopeful note to his voice. “And,
enfin,
what’s done is done, and … to borrow the phrase from the Order of the Garter,
Honi soit qui mal y pensé,
what?”

Lewrie goggled at him, dredging through his poor abilities with French for a long second or two before he twigged to it.
Shame on him who thinks evil of it!
he understood, at last.

“Grr,” again from Strachan, who
was
a Knight of the Garter.

“Mine arse on a…,” Lewrie croaked.

I’m in through the scullery door … or the coal scuttle,
Lewrie thought, whilst the courtier beamed and nodded and Strachan ground his teeth. He shook his head in dis-belief that the King, who should have been better off in Bedlam by this point, could announce his marriage to his horse like the Roman Emperor Caligula, and the sycophants in the royal court would find an
excuse
for it, and ain’t he the wag, though?

’Twixt the King, the shaky Prime Minister William Pitt, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s threatened invasion, England’s in a pretty pickle,
he sadly thought;
pretty much up Shit’s Creek!

“Now I think I
really
need a drink,” Lewrie told them.

There was a soft rap at the door, and a servant whispered that the rest of the honourees were assembled for their presentations. The senior courtier nodded and bade them be sent in.

With them, thankfully, came another servant with a silver tray of wine glasses, yet another with a magnum of champagne (a war with the French notwithstanding), so that Lewrie could snatch one and press the second servant to top him up while the others were receiving the marks of their new distinctions.

“Gentlemen, a glass with you all,” Sir Harper Strachan said at last as the champagne circulated and Lewrie got his second. “Congratulations and happy felicitations on this day!”

After the toast, they were free to re-enter the great hall and circulate with their families and friends. Captain Blanding stuck to Lewrie for a bit on their way out.

“Sir Stephen, sir,” Lewrie said with a wink and a nod, raising what was left of his champagne in toast.

“Sir Alan, haw!” Blanding responded in kind. “Ehm … did they set things right?” he enquired, leaning close and looking concerned.

“In a manner o’ speakin’, sir,” Lewrie told him. “It seems the Crown don’t
make
errors, else they’d have t’admit that His Majesty is soft in the head, again, so … it’ll stand, can you believe it.”

That froze Blanding dead in his tracks, with a stricken look on his phyz. “Well now, sir … that’s simply … ehm.” It seemed that Blanding
did
feel irked by Lewrie being elevated to his own level; as if his own investiture had been diminished, and robbed him of all the joy of it. He recovered well-enough to say, “Well now! Congratulations to you, Captain Lewrie.”

“And mine to you, sir,” Lewrie replied. “
You,
at least, more than earned it,” he confessed.

“Ah, there’s the wife!” Blanding quickly said, looking away.

“And you must show her how well you look in sash and star, sir,” Lewrie said, looking for escape as much as Blanding.

“Aye, I shall. See you later, Sir Alan,” Blanding said.

“Sir Stephen,” Lewrie replied, tossing off a brief bow from the waist, and wondering if that promised celebration dinner and jaunt to Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral was dead-off.

Once he found his father, Lewrie could not help giving him a toothy grin and saying, “I out-rank you, now. Do we ever dine out together, I’ll precede you to the table.”

“Mean t’say yer baronetcy’ll
stand
?” Sir Hugo gawped, then was taken with loud laughter, the place and the august company bedamned. “Good Christ, but he must be deeper in the Bedlam ‘Blue-Devils’ than anyone thought. Sir Romney Embleton probably won’t mind, but, damme, will young Harry throw a horse-killin’ fit, begad!”

“Yes, he will … won’t he?” Lewrie smirked, savouring how it would go down with that otter-chinned fool to have a second baronet in Anglesgreen when his father passed on, and he inherited the rank.

“I must write Sewallis at once, and tell him he’ll be a knight when I am gone,” Lewrie said. “Now, where’s some more champagne?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Now, how
does
a baronet conduct himself?
Lewrie asked himself as he made a slow circuit of the hall with a fresh champagne in his hand, and an eye out for the nearest refills. And for the comely young women present … so long as it wasn’t the Blandings’ mort. Sir Hugo had strayed away in pursuit of the auburn-haired woman they’d spotted early on; he wished him joy of it, though he smugly thought that she’d not had eyes for
that
old rogue. It must be admitted that, now that he was knight and baronet, even a back-door variety, he began to enjoy the rare chance to preen. It wouldn’t last, of course; within a few days he would be back in dreary Sheerness, back aboard
Reliant,
and in the
minutiae
of ship-board life, and his sash and star stowed away at the bottom of a sea-chest. The hall was not so crowded with people, nor was it as candle-lit as it might be for an evening event, that it had grown oppressively warm, and someone must have thrown up the many sash-windows and opened some glassed double-doors to let in the cool day’s wind.

“Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, sir!” someone called out in a braying voice, forcing him to turn and peer about. A tall fellow with a full head of long dark blond hair was beaming at him, a fellow garbed in a uniform of some cavalry regiment, and epaulets of a Lieutenant-Colonel.

“Sir?” Lewrie said, smiling back. “You have the better of me.”

“Percy Stangbourne, Sir Alan,” the dashing fellow said, coming to shake hands vigourously. “Viscount Stangbourne, but everyone calls me Percy. Congratulations on your knighthood, Sir Alan, and gaining a baronetcy.”

“Thank you kindly, my lord,” Lewrie responded, an idea nagging at him that he’d heard that name before, but …

“I bring felicitations from a mutual acquaintance of ours, too, Sir Alan,” Stangbourne teased. “Mistress Eudoxia Durschenko, of equestrian fame?”

Oh,
he’s
the chap Father wrote me of!
Lewrie realised, wondering if he would be called out for a duel by a jealous lover.

“You are acquainted with her, my lord? Percy?” Lewrie asked as innocently as he could (he was rather good at shamming “innocent,” just as he was at portraying false modesty) yet thinking,
Honest t’God, your honour, sir, I never laid a finger on yer daughter … sister … wife … mistress! And why the Devil ain’t he wearin’ a powdered wig, too?

“Mistress Eudoxia and I were fortunate enough to make our acquaintance during the last Winter interval, whilst riding in the park, and I have had the further great fortune to have obtained her father’s permission to call upon her, Sir Alan,” Lord Stangbourne blathered enthusiastically, like a teen in “cream-pot” love.

“He
did
?” Lewrie exclaimed, stunned. “If Arslan Artimovitch did, I’d have t’declare ye the luckiest man in all England!”

Probably showed him all his daggers, pistols, and his
lions,
to give him good warnin’,
Lewrie thought.

“So I consider myself, sir!” Stangbourne boasted.

“Seen them lately?” Lewrie asked.

“Off on their Summer touring,” Lord Stangbourne said with an impatient shrug, “up to the reeky towns of Scotland and back.” He had to swipe at the romantic mop of hair that fell over his forehead. “We do write, twice weekly. Mistress Eudoxia had spoken so admiringly of you, sir, and of your
splendid
defence of their ship when they were returning from Africa some years back, so … when I heard your name called, I simply
had
to meet the man who saved my intended, express my thanks, and take the measure of so bold a fellow, ha ha!”